Wednesday, November 30, 2016

This week, The Walking Dead slows down a bit;
veering off the beaten path of this season’s Negan storyline, to reunite us
with everybody’s twelfth favorite main character, Tara. If you’ll remember (or
not), we last saw Tara (Alanna Masterson) in the season six episode, “Not
Tomorrow Yet,” when she and Heath (Corey Hawkins) left on a two-week supply run
after the group’s takedown of the Savior’s satellite outpost. Since then, a
lot’s happened- we’ve seen the deaths of two major characters (three, if you
count Denise), as well as the introduction of multiple new characters, including
the Kingdom’s King Ezekiel and Shiva. Meanwhile, Daryl’s currently being held captive at
the Sanctuary, Maggie and Sasha have moved to the Hillltop, and as recently as
last week, Carl and Jesus have stowed away aboard one of Negan’s supply trucks
en route to Savior-town. But really, who cares about all of that?

Rather than
show us the next chapter in the Rick v. Negan saga, The Walking Dead presses pause on the current storyline to focus on
a character most casual fans probably forgot existed, and another character casual
fans definitely forgot existed. I haven’t really been jonesing for an
opportunity to catch-up with Tara and Heath (I do remember who they are,
though, for the record), but their offscreen story is one that probably needed to be told eventually; though,
the timing of their episode is pretty unfortunate. I'm not completely opposed
to a Tara-centric episode, but when it airs directly after the season’s first
real cliffhanger, and grinds the plot to a screeching halt, it comes across as
“filler-ish,” and is hard to enjoy. And this *would* have been a good hour of The Walking Dead to enjoy. Tara’s been a
group mainstay since season four, and finally finds herself with something to do
besides following Glenn around, or getting shoehorned into an out of left field
romance (sorry Denise fan).

(Photo Credit: AMC)

Realistically, though, there was no other
way to handle this. Tara had to go offscreen for a while to accommodate Alanna
Masterson’s maternity leave, and bumping this episode up or down in the
schedule would have caused more pacing problems than it would have solved. For
instance, while postponing this episode, until after Jesus and Carl’s Excellent
Adventure, would have been more immediately satisfying, doing so would have made
'Swear' the lead-in to the midseason finale, which is not ideal. And forget
leaving this episode until after the midseason break. By then, it would be
almost a year since we last saw Heath and Tara, in which case, you might as
well not bring them back at all.

The earliest ‘Swear’ could have aired
this season is maybe third- right
after ‘The Well.’ But, this would have pushed current episode three, the
Daryl-centric ‘The Cell,’ back a week, meaning we would've had to wait two
whole episodes after the premiere, to see how a member of the main group dealt with the
aftermath of Glenn and Abraham’s deaths. The one benefit of this hypothetical
schedule, is that we would have had five straight episodes of Savior-storyline
goodness, starting with 'The Cell,' and ending with the midseason finale. In
reality, though, this never would have worked. Airing such a weak episode so
early on in the season could have been disastrous, especially since The Walking Dead still finds itself in a
rather precarious ratings situation, despite its all-time viewed seventh season
premiere.

So, if it couldn't have been moved
forward, and it couldn't have been pushed back, that means the writers made the
best possible scheduling decision, right? Well, not necessarily. I think the
shrewd decision might have been to switch ‘Swear’ with last week’s Hilltop
episode, the fifth of the season. It would have delayed Maggie’s first
post-premiere appearance another week, but considering episode four (two weeks
ago) tried to “trick” us into thinking Maggie died, an extra week of filler
could have squeezed out a bit more suspense, before inevitably revealing that she’s
alive and well. Even this isn’t the perfect solution, though. Having to wait
four weeks to find out how Maggie’s dealing with the death of her husband is
just too long of a wait for such important character development.

As for the actual episode? It’s…not
great. Probably the worst of the season. Tara just isn’t a compelling enough character
to carry an episode on her own, and it shows in nearly every non-action scene
she’s in. But hey, look at how quirky and awkward she is. That’s cool…right? Heath’s
contributions are predictably just as marginal, and the fact that Corey
Hawkins is slated to star in the new 24
reboot, doesn’t bode well for the character’s long term viability. We do
get a nice bit of world building this week, and the Oceanside community does
have a pretty interesting culture and origin story, at least relative to some
of the other groups we’ve come across. I don’t think this is the last we’ve
seen of the Oceanside women, but if it is, they were a pretty satisfying group
of one-off antagonists, with an original backstory, and just enough bite to
back up their bark. Although, the fact that they were bested by Tara is mildly
disappointing.

(Photo Credit: AMC)

With just two weeks to go until the midseason
finale, The Walking Dead enters the
homestretch of season 7A with a half-hearted filler episode that ignores most
of the recent central plot development, to focus on a pair of characters that
haven’t been heard from (or missed) since the latter third of season six. It’s
not incredibly uncharacteristic of The
Walking Dead to see its season fizzle out after a strong start, but ‘Swear’
is an unusually poor example of filler, even by TWD standards. It's barely relevant to the season’s overall plot,
and fails to tell a particularly interesting self-contained story. In
television, each episode is precious. There are only so many hours in a season,
in a series, to tell meaningful stories that tie together into overarching
narratives. I can’t help but wonder that if Tara had just been killed off in season
six, instead of sent offscreen for half a season, maybe this episode could have
been used to explore other, more crucial plot points that are currently
dangling in the wind, waiting for resolution.

Friday, November 25, 2016

With the end of the disastrous decade long reign of Phillippe Dauman over, there has been a lot of talk of Viacom's next move which seems quite strange since the company only has one option worth contemplating, merging with CBS as quickly as possible.

With surely no one crazy enough to risk their reputation turning around a company that ownsincreasingly irrelevant and underperfomingmedia networks, low on cash and is $12 billion in debt, Viacom not merging with CBS is suicide. Understandably, highly respected CBS CEO Les Moonves is less than thrilled with the prospect of his company merging with Viacom which currently, for the lack of better words, looks like a shit sandwich. Unfortunately, for Moonves at least, the decision to merge with Viacom isn't entirely up to him.

The decision to merge the two would largely depend on redstone family (principally Sumner and daughter Shari Redstone) who own 80% of both companies through the company National Amusements. Both Redstones are in favour of merging both companies which split over a decade ago and have already made moves to see it through.

With both companies boards stacked with members loyal to the redstones, the merger looks like a matter of time. In truth, Viacom would not be in this position if the company would have got rid of now former CEO Philippe Dauman five years ago instead of last August as the Frenchman is largely responsible for the glaring weaknesses that beset the company. Much of Viacom can be laid at Dauman's feet as he oversaw arguably the dumbest capital allocation strategy ever pursued by a media company andfailed to respond to glaring market trends particularly the rise of SVOD companies such as Netflix and Hulu and the increasingmaturity ofPay TV market.

Because of Dauman criminally negligiblemistakes, Viacom are alarmingly vulnerable as they own media networks in an age where the market for them is shrinking rapidly. The upshot of this trend is that it affects their two biggest markets, TV and advertising. Viacom for years made their crust bullying cable and satellite pay TV operators into paying large carriage fees by leveraging their popular networks such MTV and Comedy Central forcingpay TVoperators to cough upfor less popular networks in their portfolio and then sell airtime to marketers and agencies during commercial breaks which has made Viacom one of the most powerful media conglomerates in the world.

However, this business model had dangerous weaknesses as it made Viacom unhealthy dependent on the pay TV market for their daily bread. Thanks to rise of Netflix and SVOD in general and pay TV operators losing subscribers every quarter for the last five years,Viacom's pay TV dependent business model has blown up in their faces and nobody knows just how to pick up the pieces.

The only way out of the mess Viacom finds themselves in is merging with CBS who have negotiated the maturity of pay TV and the rapid rise of SVOD better than most media companies. CBS, unlike Viacom, has some footing in the SVOD market with Showtime anytime and thanks to its content deal with the NFL, it has its hands on the most important content in the TV business, sports. However, CBS, like Viacom, is low on cash and is $8 billion in debt. Nonetheless, CBS are still in a better position than Viacom which despite some downsides, makes a merger viable.

In sum, Viacom can thank their lucky stars they're part of the Redstone universe as if they weren't, one could only imagine where Viacom would be.